Pop Loser No. 99: The One That Comes Before 100

A newsletter of innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair collected and written by @poploser.

Way back when I worked at a big fancy agency, I ran a “lunch and learn” session that highlighted new or obscure web tools and networks people should be using (I think I called it “Web Tools.0”). Number one on my list was a brand new thing called Instapaper. A decade later, it’s still my most-used service/app/website/whatever.

Wired was probably the first or second magazine I subscribed to. I let that subscription lapse during a cull on paper being sent to my house a few years ago and when, frankly, the magazine was in a bit of a lull. But when reading about the 25th anniversary, I realized Wired is probably doing its best work ever right now. And they added a paywall. So I guess I subscribe again.

YouTube mostly escaped scrutiny in the wake of Trump’s election—people instead focusing their attention on Facebook’s fake news problem and the vast awfulness of Twitter. But YouTube’s algorithm looks like it might be a real problem for all of us.

Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth. In one of the few public explanations of how the formula works – an academic paper that sketches the algorithm’s deep neural networks, crunching a vast pool of data about videos and the people who watch them – YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”.

Every media outlet on the planet is churning out stories about how technology is wrecking us. And maybe it is. But the science so far has been kind of shitty.

People from all backgrounds use technology—and no two people use it exactly the same way. “What that means in practice is that it’s really hard to do purely observational research into the effects of something like screen time, or social media use,” says MIT social scientist Dean Eckles, who studies how interactive technologies impact society’s thoughts and behaviors. You can’t just divide participants into, say, those with phones and those without. Instead, researchers have to compare behaviors between participants while accounting for variables like income, race, and parental education.

After a few lectures on the basics of behavioral psychology, students began building Facebook apps of their own. They used psychological tools like reciprocity and suggestion to engineer apps that could, for example, send your friends a virtual hug or get your friends to join an online game of dodgeball. At the time, Facebook had just begun promoting third-party apps in its news feed. The iPhone launched in the summer of 2007; the App Store would follow the year later. Fogg’s teachings became a playbook on how to make apps stick just as apps were becoming a thing.

Those “deepfakes” AI-generated porn videos I linked to last week are being banned from hosting sites, including Pornhub, due to lack of consent. The group where all this started has also been pulled from Reddit.

Teaching media literacy is no longer enough—we need to teach very specific kinds of media literacy.

Porn Literacy, which began in 2016 and is the focus of a pilot study, was created in part by Emily Rothman, an associate professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who has conducted several studies on dating violence, as well as on porn use by adolescents. She told me that the curriculum isn’t designed to scare kids into believing porn is addictive, or that it will ruin their lives and relationships and warp their libidos. Instead it is grounded in the reality that most adolescents do see porn and takes the approach that teaching them to analyze its messages is far more effective than simply wishing our children could live in a porn-free world.

For Netflix, quality is optional. Which makes sense—video stores rented all kinds of crap, but the point was just to have a wide selection. It’s not that they don’t necessarily care about quality at all, it’s that for their business, it’s not the only or even the most important thing.

But instead of just taking the L, Paramount was able to offload it to Netflix, which is still working on making a name for itself as a platform for original movies, and ready to spend for a name-brand movie, dud or not. The streaming service bought the movie only to turn around almost immediately after and offer it to audiences with its Super Bowl stunt. What Netflix was touting with the 30-second spot that played during the game wasn’t that it had this movie and it was good — half the footage was from the original Cloverfield. Netflix was just advertising that it had the movie, period. Whether it was good or bad was incidental — what mattered was that it was there.

On planned obsolescence and the death of your favourite toys. We’ve probably all been through this a bunch of times now. It’s infuriating. That said, my kids still love watching Netflix on my old first-gen iPad.

My old iPad just turned five, and it’s starting to die. If it could wonder about such things, it might question this prognosis. Its memory, after all, still retrieves information as quickly as it ever did. Its face hasn’t aged a day, projecting as vividly as it did in 2012, when Apple called it “stunning” and “gorgeous.” It hasn’t suffered vision loss; the camera still works. The touch-screen works. Buttons work. Speaker, headphone jack, charging port: All still do what I ask of them. On examination, almost nothing about the device seems to have changed. And yet it’s starting to give up, and so am I.

Facebook has created a centrally designed internet. It’s a lamer, shittier looking internet. It’s just not as cool as an internet that is a big, chaotic space filled with tons of independently operating websites who are able to make a living because they make something cool that people want to see.

That Billy Mitchell is still a public figure we pay attention to is fantastic! Also, he’s a filthy fucking cheater. (This also calls into question the DK score he was shown submitting during The King Of Kong.)

The difference between a MAME-set record and one set on an authentic Donkey Kong printed circuit board isn’t academic. Besides important differences in timing and controls between the two, MAME allows players to easily record and replay inputs to piece together a record-breaking run from multiple attempts. While there’s no direct evidence that Mitchell did this kind of rerecording, presenting a MAME run as actual arcade gameplay would certainly introduce the possibility of such cheating.

Checkers? Chess? Go? All were considered formidable tests of intelligence until they were solved by increasingly more complex algorithms. Learning how a magic trick works makes it no longer magic, and discovering how a test of intelligence can be solved makes it no longer a test of intelligence.

It honestly blows my mind that there’s still no such thing as a printer that doesn’t suck. I can only assume building such a device is impossible.

Late in “Oslo,” J. T. Rogers’s recent play about the negotiation of the Oslo Accords, diplomats are finalizing the document when one of them reports a snag: “It’s stuck in the copy machine and I can’t get it out!” The employees in Mike Judge’s 1999 film “Office Space” grow so frustrated with their jam-prone printer that they destroy it with a baseball bat in a slow-motion montage set to the Geto Boys’ “Still.” (Office workers around the country routinely reënact this scene, posting the results on YouTube.) According to the Wall Street Journal, printers are among the most in-demand objects in “rage rooms,” where people pay to smash things with sledgehammers; Battle Sports, a rage-room facility in Toronto, goes through fifteen a week. Meanwhile, in the song “Paper Jam” John Flansburgh, of the band They Might Be Giants, sees the jam as a stark moral test. “Paper jam / paper jam,” he sings. “It would be so easy to walk away.”

Unsurprisingly, the engineers who specialize in paper jams see them differently. Engineers tend to work in narrow subspecialties, but solving a jam requires knowledge of physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, computer programming, and interface design. “It’s the ultimate challenge,” Ruiz said.